Jay Rosen
Professor of Journalism, New York University (retired)
Jay Rosen has been one of the major thinkers in journalism since the 1990s. Younger followers may think of him mainly as a media critic, and there's no doubting his influence in that field. Through his blog, PressThink, and his social media presence (especially back in Twitter's heyday), Rosen showed an uncanny ability to frame issues in a way that made a lot of us think about what we were doing.
The "production of innocence" was his phrase for "a public showing by professional journalists that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of—and here we enter the realm of dread—political bias."
"Not the odds, but the stakes" was Rosen's attempt to move news organizations away from covering politics as a poll-driven sporting event and more on its actual consequences. "The stakes, of course, mean the stakes for American democracy," Rosen explained. "The stakes are what might happen as a result of the election."
But alongside Rosen's media criticism was an earlier, arguably more important mission—an effort to find ways to involve members of the public more directly in journalism through his work on public journalism (sometimes called civic journalism) in the '90s and, later, through Assignment Zero, described by the Citizendium as "an experiment in crowd-sourced journalism, allowing collaboration between amateur and professional journalists to collectively produce a piece of work that describes correlations between crowd-sourced techniques and a popular movement."
—Dan Kennedy, Media Nation, October 2025
